Tag Archives: SSL

Links: 17th May

“He [Galton] even measured the life spans of sovereigns and clergymen, which, being similar to the life spans of people in other professions, led him to conclude that prayer brought no benefit.”
— Leonard Mlodinov

Mlodinov’s “The Drunkard’s Walk…” is a fantastically good book. I couldn’t pull myself away of it, I’d read it in the morning before the work starts and right after I wrap it up for a day. A captivating overview of mathematics of chance, random, and statistics put in a very comprehendible form and language, intertwined with amusing digressions into history of mathematical thought, it connects randomness with our everyday life.  Scientific American’s comment reflect my feelings: “Delightfully entertaining”.

Recommend it wholeheartedly:

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives: Leonard Mlodinow: 9780307275172: Amazon.com: Books

The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives: Leonard Mlodinow: 9780307275172: Amazon.com: Bookshttp://www.amazon.com/The-Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules/dp/0307275175It’s an interesting subject, and sometimes we don’t believe that many things in life are random, but as it is shown in this book, most of it is, even if we call it something…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Technology:

  • Very handy github-hosted automatic page refresher, will update a given URL in an iframe at a specified interval.
  • For those who seldom face a task of configuring SSL, here’s an SSL config generator for various web servers. The point is this generator gives you a config that matches current demands in terms of security, i.e. vulnerable cyphers would be disabled, etc.
  • If you accidentally downloaded a huge file from an svn repo that you don’t want to keep in your working copy, you can remove and ignore them in the following

    You can later re-enable the folder with svn update --set-depth infinity bigFolder
  • This has been sitting in my notes for a long time: why DNS root record cannot have CNAME and how to live with it: CloudFlare’s DNS flattening. Frankly, they should just add this bit into DNS specification.
  • Bleep peer-to-peer instant messenger got released. It’s frustrating to see the industry failing at producing a modern advanced and convenient IM really. If Bleep is going to maintain (semi-)direct connections with your contact list, sending updates and notifications, that would dry your battery on mobile devices.
  • Reminder for myself: iOS firmware downloads.
  • And finally, meetup.com is a very odd platform. I’ve joined it few months earlier cause we organised a group and now for some reason, meetup.com decided I’m some sort of a fraudster or spammer and limited my account so I virtually cannot do anything, neither send a message, nor edit my profile. After googling I found I’m not the only one suffering: Meetup automatic fraud systems out of control. Support doesn’t seem to be cooperative at all with the only one suggestion: remove your existing account and register a new one. Well, thanks Meetup, I’ll remove my account; not sure I’ll be registering again though.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwgOWDUlDgY&spfreload=10

Links: Nov 8

You know, I’m totally baffled by the contrast in quality of Obama for America 2012 and ObamaCare projects. The first one was top-notch bleeding-edge technology project carried out with gleaming excellence, the second though has been a model failure by all means.

4Gb/s, 10k requests per second, 2,000 nodes, 3 datacenters, 180TB and 8.5 billion requests. Design, deploy, dismantle in 583 days to elect the President. #madops

Tweet above summarises the challenge for OFA2012 project and here are few links about it:

Calamities with HealthCare.gov look like they’ve been using services of the /dev/null-as-a-service kind. Facepalm.

Got an email from google+ telling me I’m eligible for custom URL. Made me even log in, found out it was still as revolting as it had been for a year or so, and on top of it, my very first posts to google+ were missing. Actually, one of the reasons I started to use G+ was to save interesting links I had come across, and as you might imagine, I’m thrilled to discover they wipe my older posts. So expect some flashbacks, as I’m not going to loose interesting stuff and will repost it here.

Continuing to catch-up on links:

Technology

  • The Ars Technica Review of Mac OS X Mavericks, in-depth, long, and interesting reading.
  • Recommended server-side SSL configurations
  • DevOps Look-fors — the way of assessing your processes maturity
  • Beej’s Guide to Network Programming
  • Question asked on many interviews — can root kill init process? It depends.
  • Algorithms part 2 commenced!
  • Boostrap 3 add-ons collection (in Russian).

English

Other

  • Banksy turns 50$ painting into 1M$ treasure
  • How a plan becomes policy:

In the beginning was the plan.
And then came the assumptions.
And the assumptions were without form.
And the plan was without substance.
And darkness was upon the face of the workers.
And they spoke among themselves saying,
“It is a crock of shit and it stinketh.”
And the workers went unto their supervisors and said,
“It is a pale of dung and none may abide the odor thereof.”
And the supervisor went unto their managers and said,
“It is a container of excrement and it is very strong, such that none may abide by it.”
And the managers went unto their directors, saying,
“It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength.”
And the directors spoke among themselves, saying to one another,
“It contains that which aids plant growth and it is very strong.”
And the directors went unto the vice presidents, saying unto them,
“It promotes growth and is very powerful.”
And the vice presidents went unto the president, saying unto him,
“The new plan will promote the growth and vigor of the company, with powerful effects.”
And the president looked upon the plan and saw that it was good.
And the plan became policy.
This is how shit happens.

http://ogun.stanford.edu/~bnayfeh/plan.html

  • Jennifer’s the winner: Six Decades of the Most Popular Names for Girls, State-by-State

Popular Girl’s Names

 

Links: Oct 27

This has been a busy month and, what pleases me, very productive. Apple’s recent announcement managed to surprise in many ways, which is delightful as well; if you’re still on Mountain Lion consider upgrading, Mavericks got it right in so many places, that it’s even difficult to tell which changes are most compelling.

I’ve lagged on links, however, so catching up:

Technology

  • What nohup does:

  • Query against over 1500 global DNS servers

English

Other

  • I’ve finally found where the phrase “With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine” comes from! Appears it’s from RFC1925:

(3) With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not
necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they
are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them
as they fly overhead.

But references to flying pigs appear even in Lewis Carrol’s Alice:

"Thinking again?" the Duchess asked, with another dig of her sharp little chin.
"I've a right to think," said Alice sharply, for she was beginning to feel a little worried.
"Just about as much right," said the Duchess, "as pigs have to fly...." — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 9.